Blue Poppies Read online

  “That’s an antenna, not a bloody wind horse stable. It’s modern equipment, understand? I’ll have it treated with respect, Nima, not arsed about with!”

  “It is respect . . .” began Nima.

  “Serious respect!” snapped Jamie. “You have to get serious, Nima! You think your waterwheel is going to keep one Communist out of Tibet? Is that what you think?”

  He stepped smartly to the ladder. Khenpo Nima watched him climb.

  “We deal with China in our way, Jemmy. That is for us.”

  “Oh? Hasn’t stopped them before, has it? Still, if you can do it with prayers, you’ve no need of me and the radio. I’ll take this down and be off home to Inverkeithing, if you’ll excuse me.”

  He had taken out a pocketknife and was busily sawing off Karjen’s flags. Karjen stood back scowling.

  “Jemmy!” shouted Nima, climbing after him. “Jemmy, please, listen to me, stop this.”

  Jamie paused a second, looking into Khenpo Nima’s eyes. He said: “I came here under contract, I’ve a job to do, but that’s it. I’m happy that I came, but I’m not a Tibetan.”

  The breeze picked up the little flags from where Jamie had dropped them on the flat roof, and whisked them over the parapet. Khenpo Nima regarded Jamie with sadness. “You are family to us now, Jemmy. We thought you would like to be a part of our prayers.”

  There was a movement in the doorway of the house. Dechen crept out to see who was speaking so loudly. Behind her, Puton came awkwardly and looked up towards the roof. Jamie saw her. “Nima, I’m not ungrateful,” he said, more quietly, “don’t think that. But I’ll not be caught up where it’s not of my choosing.”

  “Of course, Jemmy,” said the monk, sensing reconciliation, “We are so thankful to you here, do you know? Please, come down, and let us leave this matter.”

  Jamie relented. A moment later he followed Nima down the ladder. Karjen picked up the remaining flags and furtively retied several before descending also.

  At nightfall, Jamie withdrew into his room once more, painting. The evenings were cold already and the kang stove-bed was alight. It was far from ideal, of course, attempting delicate color washes by the light of a smoking butter-oil lamp. But he knew what he was about—which was a studied dreaming.

  The village outside fell quiet behind heavy wooden shutters, but breezes moved among the little prayer bells mounted on springs that had proliferated in every courtyard. Their tinkling seeped throughout Jyeko. If you tuned a sharp ear to the darkness, you’d catch a sound like a feather passing among glass chimes. Jamie, though, was too absorbed—so he did not hear Puton’s stick move across the floor of the outer room.

  She tapped twice. Surprised, he froze with the watercolor brush in his hand. She tapped again, and he rose instantly to open the door. She stood in the doorway regarding him, with the light from a lamp behind her making an aureole in the margins of her hair. Her face was shadowed, until Jamie moved slightly to his left and the table lamp found her. She pushed a loose lock away from her cheek, lifting her face.

  She said, “If you permit, I have something for you.”

  He thought, her voice often has this tinge to it, half pride, half apprehension. He remembered his manners. “Heavens, come in!” he said.

  She hesitated. “No, I only . . .”

  But he had already backed aside from the door and waved her in: “Please, take a seat. The kang is warm. Please.”

  So she came forward, glancing at him, and sat on the fur covers, placing her stick beside her. Jamie went back to his stool at the table.

  “I am sorry to disturb your work,” said Puton.

  “Just sketches.” He smiled, wondering what she made of his ever-so-British watercolors, so unlike the heavy gouaches of Tibet.

  Puton looked down. She held in her hand the red scarf from the games. Was she going to give it back? Had he offended propriety somehow? She said: “I have tried to make this beautiful for you, though it is not beautiful like your painting.”

  She held it out, folded. It was certainly the same scarf. Puzzled, Jamie put out a hand. As he did so, she let the scarf fall open towards him.

  At both ends, some eight or nine inches of the red silk were covered in embroidery. The individual stitches were minuscule, barely visible in the quivering lamplight. The threads were indigo and green, cobalt blue and white with, here and there, fine gold traces. The patterns swarmed exquisitely over the silk surface: miniature dragons and mountain ranges, tiny geese in flight, all twined into a square frame. In the center of each design, in coiled blue and white, were the letters of the radio call sign: T4JW.

  He lifted the scarf close to his face to peer at the work, and whispered, “Good grief.”

  “It is the ‘call sign,’ yes?”

  “Yes!” replied Jamie. “It’s . . . it’s really astonishing.”

  She watched him closely, a hint of anxiety discernible in her face. Then she relaxed a little, realizing that he found the gift acceptable. “I have made this for you,” she began, “because you have honored me with friendship.” Jamie looked up at her face, which lamplight caressed. He saw that the downy hair that joined her brows was not so much black as a dark honey. “And because you have given us a home, which Jyeko would not.”

  Jamie thought: What was my life like before she came? He could barely remember.

  “It’s been my pleasure,” he hazarded. He felt awkward, caught out. The woman and her child had permeated every corner of his rooms, bringing a civilizing warmth. A quality had come into the house like the rich, sweet scent of an herb that had perfumed his world so subtly that he’d not noted its coming.

  Puton reached for her stick.

  “Don’t go just yet,” he said quickly. “Please, be comfortable for a moment.”

  She regarded him, then slowly put down the stick. She looked towards the pictures fixed to the wall above his table. “You have painted your home,” she said levelly, “because you are wishing to go there.”

  “My home?”

  She examined the paintings: an idyll of heather, lochs and foreshores. She said: “Is it somewhere that I could live?”

  “You? Yes, I suppose. Good heavens, why?”

  “I have to live somewhere also, with Dechen.”

  He saw concentration in her gaze, he thought that he saw her nostrils flare with some emotion he could not read. Even as he saw it, a notion came to him: that this woman might live anywhere and make a home of it—just as he himself could not.

  “Well,” he grinned, “let’s go to India, I say. You come and keep house for me there. Life could be pretty civilized, I should think. We must do it!”

  It was said with all the light sincerity of a young man’s moment. Puton remained motionless, save for a slight rise and fall of her breast. He heard her breathing; behind that, wisps of the brittle prayer bells out in the lanes. He moved to sit alongside her on the warm covers of the kang, twisting to gaze at her profile and the pores of her skin. They remained complicit in stillness for half a minute more.

  Then she picked up the embroidered scarf from the tumbled furs between them. She turned to Jamie, saying: “This you can wear when the wind creeps about your throat.”

  She lifted it, her every movement slow and steady as though not to startle an animal. She raised it, passing the end behind his neck while he stayed still. Then she tied a single turn in the scarf in front of Jamie’s throat.

  “Call sign T4JW,” she said, smiling full upon him for the first time. His mind reeled as though struck a blow, all his loneliness screeching with desire.

  At that moment, a clumsy wooden banging came from the yard: Karjen on his way to the latrine. Puton caught her breath, tensing. “He will see that my room is open.”

  “So what?” said Jamie, surprised.

  “But it is Karjen!”

  “And it’s my house,” said Jamie, thinking that he should perhaps assert some authority.

  “He will tell the village.” She grabbed her st
ick and stabbed it downwards at the very moment that she tried to stand. The stick caught awkwardly in the rug. Puton had not gained her balance; she staggered clumsily against the side of the bed, twisting her foot. She gave a small cry of grief, of fright. Jamie’s hands went out to her sides, catching her.

  “Easy!” he said, setting her down. “No harm . . .”

  “Oh, yes!” she cried, breathless from the pain flashing through her leg. She grasped the stick with whitened knuckles, rose and was gone through the open door.

  If Karjen was spreading rumor, there were no echoes; Khenpo Nima said nothing. But for Jamie it was enough that Puton was alarmed. A silent net of searching looks fell over the house. Puton stayed clear of him.

  Only at meal times did she approach him. Jamie would take his seat and wait; Puton would enter with a bowl of hot buttered barleymeal in her free hand. She would make her way towards Jamie, and Karjen would stand directly behind her in the doorway. She would feel the old man’s look on her back like a whip teasing naked skin before it strikes. She would raise her eyes to Jamie, filled with questioning. Jamie, able to see Karjen’s stare across her shoulder, tried to smile blandly. It all made his scalp crawl.

  Khenpo Nima was there twice daily: he sensed the mood that encrusted everything like salt drying on skin. He observed Puton bringing food and refreshment to Jamie, how she laid clean clothing on his bed with a particular slowness. He observed how Karjen hovered and glowered, how the bandit’s temper decayed, how he cursed the ponies for nothing. Nima was there one day when Karjen pursued little Dechen from the living room with murderous snarls. He had seen the little girl pick up a small box of blue lacquered wood, and had roared, “Theft! Theft!” so that the child ran weeping to her mother. Nima heard Jamie cry out, “Karjen, that’s not necessary, she can have it, I’d like her to have it . . .”

  And when the old man stamped away to the fuel shed, Nima glimpsed the looks that Jamie and Puton exchanged. In those eyes, he saw youth boiling and burning. In the poised stillness, he saw two spirits hurtling towards each other. It alarmed Khenpo Nima, but delighted him more.

  Over tea that evening Jamie was edgy and taciturn. As they ate the last of the Moffat toffee, Khenpo Nima said: “Jemmy, I think that Karjen is a problem for you?”

  Jamie did not look at him. “A problem?” he queried evasively.

  “Perhaps he is sometimes in the way.”

  Khenpo Nima was smiling gently at him. Oh, what was the use in pretending anything? Nima continued, “It is no part of our deal that you must have Karjen in your house.”

  The moment he said this, Khenpo Nima kicked himself hard. But it could not be unsaid.

  Jamie frowned, as though recalling a difficulty. “Our deal? You mean that contract you were flourishing a while back? The old one must have expired, surely. Wasn’t it due?”

  Jamie stood and went through the door of his bedroom. He hoiked open a box under his table and pulled out a long brown envelope, saying, “It was for some silly period like twenty-one months, wasn’t it? No, just twenty. So that’s . . . May, June, July. It expired in July. For Heaven’s sake, am I still meant to be here?” He looked askance at Khenpo Nima. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  The monk shrugged. “What could I say?”

  “So, you just hoped I’d forget all about it?”

  At that moment, Dechen appeared timidly in the doorway and an instant later Puton’s hand was on the child to restrain her. As she pulled Dechen back, Jamie’s eyes clung to her.

  “I would like to stay, Nima,” murmured Jamie, and the monk knew that no contract was required. He smiled slightly at Jamie’s inability to look him in the eye.

  “And Karjen?”

  Jamie blushed violently, quite out of his depth, whispering: “He never leaves us.”

  Khenpo Nima regarded him with avuncular fondness. “In two days is our festival,” he remarked, “because our farmers gather their barley. We have mask dances to drive away ancient demons— and, you know, we face some demons now.”

  “Oh?” said Jamie, half-heartedly. “That must be entertaining.”

  “Our villagers find it wonderful and Karjen will certainly be attending. He will be there all night. Jemmy, I’m afraid you must be absent from the monastery, because we shall be addressing foreign devils.”

  “Oh. Then I will stay at home.”

  “I am so sorry. Also, Jemmy, I think Miss Puton should not come to the ceremonies. You are aware that there are some problems among the villagers about her.”

  Jamie looked up curiously at Khenpo Nima.

  “It is best that she remain here that night,” said the monk. “I shall inform her. May I take one last English toffee? They are almost finished now.”

  Singing comes from the bathroom; the woman croons, her silken lilt broken by splashes of water. The tune trickles past the door-jamb, winds out on to the dark porch along with lamplight, a little girl’s laughter and curlicues of vapor. Puton bathes Dechen and herself together. Both are naked, Dechen standing on the duckboards, Puton seated on a small stool. She takes scoops from a steaming wooden tub to rinse the borax off her girl, and Dechen stamps her feet on the wet boards, delighted. Then her mother fills the tin scoop again and pours it over herself, the warm water rolling down her brown breasts to pool between her thighs. There the short black hair waves like waterweed in a deep pond. Dechen dips one curious digit among her mother’s softened pubic curls, toying. The next deluge goes over the child’s head. The lamplight bends and waves about them, illuminating a haze of a billion water droplets looping and twining towards the crack in the doorway. On a slight draft, the vapor goes in paisley curls out into the night.

  Karjen is with every other villager up at the monastery. But Jamie waits motionless in the darkness. He stands a yard from the door, listening to the splashes, giggles and crooning from within, watching the golden glimmer through the cracks. He sees the shadows lurch as the woman rinses soap off her child and her own breasts. His head feels swollen and heavy on his shoulders, bursting with blood that swills and rushes. He has not announced his presence to Puton bathing, but she understands that he is there.

  Grander, wilder shadows, bulging and swaying under the wooden colonnades. Huge grim masks lurch towards the villagers so that children cower, warriors pull back a fraction. There are stags’ heads and demons, appalling gods, gilt and crimson heroes. All the inhabitants of the upper air are here, lurching in terrific conflict. Shawms and breathy flutes wail, and rough hide fiddles scrape, faster, faster, as the gongs crash and the cymbals smash together. The heroes loom out of the smoking torchlight, the demons stagger, flourishing charms and battle-axes: the fight is on!

  It is late now. The open yard of the monastery is jammed with people, nomads pushing for a view between prim merchants’ wives. Karjen is grinning with satisfaction at the sight of battle. The market women ogle the pop-eyed devils that will rape them all before disemboweling them with white tusks. Children between their parents’ feet pull a fold of their fathers’ gowns around them as a shield.

  But not every monk in Jyeko is out in the courtyard. In a side hall, something fearful has begun. An aged lama with the gift of prophecy is subsiding onto the hammered earth. Khenpo Nima and three monks hold him, for the headdress that he wears is massive, a crushing weight. The oracle sweats and pants and stares into an abyss that has opened in his brain. The monks shiver at the old man’s words.

  Jamie whispers, “I’m so sorry, what shall we do?”

  Puton gasps again, the bone splinters in her thigh jagging into some long nerve. She sits up on the bed, wincing, motionless for a second. Jamie tenderly places a fold of fur across her bare back and shoulder, for the room is icy although the fire beneath the kang is lit. He feels the draft touch his own naked flank, and he slips an arm around her waist for warmth.

  At last she relaxes and breathes more easily. She turns and looks at the clumsy young man. “We shall do this,” she murmurs, and carefully turns her full na
kedness towards him, pushing him flat on his back on the warm stone bed. With her hands she cautiously lifts the hurting thigh across his young body, laying it down without any pain. Then she sinks onto his chest and her face finds his cheek and neck. Her body is weightless.

  “There, Jemmy Ying-gi-li,” she says, as the flood tide rises within her. “Now you won’t hurt me.”

  Near midnight he climbed onto his roof swaddled in fur. Even with the heavy coat, tremors ran through him, an electric flicker in every muscle. They were not the shivers of cold, but a body reverberating. His head seethed, charged far beyond its normal capacity. He made a mirror of his mind, and saw the woman lying quietly on the warm kang in the room below. He had stared at her as she slept, printing her inwardly, shape and texture. The skin of her cheek a hint red and roughened, after the years of battering wind. The dark lips on a mouth a fraction open in sleep, long hairs touching her lip. A fine pulse beating on her temple, slow and steady, a little flag for her happiness.

  Jamie smiled at himself as he stood out on the roof in the icy breeze, his head thrown back and his eyes closed. He would go down and sleep by her side: blissful, oblivious sleep. But not for a minute yet.

  He opened his eyes to the moon, which hung high and blazed. Enormous silhouetted peaks were tipped with cold platinum, while the facing slopes gleamed so brightly they seemed lit from within the ice. From the gorges ran streams of rippling mercury, and the wind brought snatches of their rocky progress. It sounded altogether good to Jamie. He was grinning idiotically; a young heart brimming over.

  Jamie was thus the only person in Jyeko to see the signal flare. For an intoxicated instant, he thought this a celebratory firework. But the flare was red, its burning malevolent. It arched briefly over the low, sullen barracks on the far bank. There was a glimpse of horsemen, of bayonets at the slope, closing on the garrison from three sides.

  At the monastery, the first they knew about it was the gunfire. Across the river, a heavy machine-gun thundered. The gross sound barged into the music and killed it dead. The crowd, the players, the dancers all froze, listening, looking in fright at each other. In the side room, the monks laid their oracle half conscious on the floor. Some ran for the doors, others to the galleries above. Gathering out on the roof and the riverbank, the villagers stared across the water.